POLLy Jean Harvey - The PJ Harvey results thread

Has she ever recorded a string of tunes as inert as "Good Fortune" and "A Place Called Home" and sequenced them consecutively?

I love both those tunes and the fact that they're sequenced together

anyone else see the tour where Tricky opened?

I saw it in NYC. Can't remember the venue. Irving Plaza maybe? I saw her on the Stories From The City tour at Bowery Ballroom which was phenomenal.

I do not understand all the contempt for that record here. And people hate Good Fortune? That is just nonsense.

delighted to see so much dissent

it's more or less a mainstream rock record, employs thom yorke, seems to issue from a position of domestic contentment, abandons most of the discomfort and experimentation of her other work

i like it a lot, but can see as how it might rub a lot of fans the wrong way

tbh the only song I loathe is the one about horses.

It doesn't even rub me up the wrong way. There are a couple of decent songs and a lot of OK but boring ones. The lyrics are embarrassing (to my ears) in lots of places. If Stories had been the first of her records I'd bought (and if it must have been the first for many people), I wouldn't have bothered with her again.

Alfred OTM about Horses ("Horses - In My Dreams" should've been the name of the album haha), but I also hate We Float. What an excruciating pairing.

It's only trendy to diss Stories because Beefheart doesn't like it.

I love that last pair of songs!

it's more or less a mainstream rock record

But it's a mainstream rock record of the highest caliber. She can write a hook like very few others. Stories is my favorite record of hers for the same reason Born In The USA is my favorite Springsteen: A world-class songwriter filling a record with hits.

I just wish she included Memphis on it, one of the alltime great B-sides.

What is this Memphis? I know not of it, and it's not on iTunes.

I mentioned this on some other PJ thread, but this is a good place to bring it up again:

A few years back PJ did the score for a Broadway show that a good friend of mine was involved in. My friend spent a lot of time with her, and said she is the nicest, most down-to-Earth person you could imagine. The polar opposite of her music: she was warm, friendly and unbelievably collaborative. Couldn't say enough nice things about her.

Memphis: her tribute to Jeff Buckley

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcSkSTGrubo

"memphis" is awesome, yeah - so is "66 promises", the other "good fortune" b-side

Good Fortune and A Place Called Home have such massive singalong choruses, anyone who hates on those must necessarily hate fun.

The lyrics are embarrassing (to my ears) in lots of places

yeah this. good fortune is a good example - a catchy if unadventurous tune spoiled by these corny, pat lyrics. so un-peej.

She was happy! Happiness is simple. I thought Good Fortune did a great job of articulating the pleasant surprise of things actually going well for once, and also how delicate and fleeting that feeling is. I love that song.

feel like "good fortune" is hardly the nexus of terrible lyrics on that record. "big exit" despite its incredible exterior is pretty tough to endure lyrically

also i really love

things i once thought
unbelievable
in my life
have all taken plaaaaaace

I'll admit that Good Fortune is the only song from that album that I listen to at all. Don't remember the others tbh.

"and I feel like some bird of paradise" isn't bad either. At least that's what I think the lyrics are, I'm not 100% sure?!

You are missing out on some great songs, La Lechera. My #1 song came from Stories and it's not Good Fortune.

My #1 song came from Stories

mine too

"you said something" is so perfect, the music seems the casual expression of the lyrics

Huh, well I'll take that into consideration! I'm always willing to give PJ another chance.

love every bit of sftc, it's loose in a way none of her other records approach (or tbf attempt), and mature about happiness and love in a way nevermind none of her other records but few other rock records period attempt (maybe solo lennon on occasion)(maybe new morning?), in some ways the inverse of rid of me. at the time i was worried she was lost to mannerism (more due to the show i saw for itd? than itd? itself though the stagnation there was worrying also), this was the opposite of that and turned out to be the last time she was capable of surprising me.

The reviews at the time were overwhelmingly positive.

i mean i respect and admire and bow down before 'MAJOR ARTISTIC STATEMENT' records but increasingly i prefer the minor another day another dollar records. they're more revealing and human, they're usually funnier, and they're easier to live with.

I dunno – SFTC was a major statement, a typical I'm In Love and In The City record.

xpost well yeah the reasoning behind most of those contemp sftc reviews is suspect i will agree

soto i'm in love records are very different kind of artistic statments than i am now going to examine this thing we call love records, the former is dusty springfield the latter is sting

SFTC is both ("This is Love" the former, "Beautiful Feeling" the latter).

xpost well yeah the reasoning behind most of those contemp sftc reviews is suspect i will agree

― balls, Thursday, April 25, 2013 11:26 AM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Robert Christgau doubles his fun:

Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea [Island, 2000]
If Nirvana and Robert Johnson are rock's essence for you, so's To Bring You My Love. But if you believe the Beatles and George Clinton had more to say in the end, this could be the first PJ album you adore as well as admire. It's a question of whether you use music to face your demons or to vault right over them. Either way the demons will be there, of course, and nobody's claiming they won't catch you by the ankle and bring you down sometime--or that facing them doesn't give you a shot at running them the fuck over. Maybe that's how Harvey got to where she could enjoy the fruits of her own genius and sexuality. Or maybe she just met the right guy. Tempos and pudendum juiced, she feels the world ending and feels immortal on the very first track. The other 11 songs she takes from there. A+

I know it's impolite to put it this way, but sometimes getting laid can really be good for a person. On the recorded evidence--with no claim to any lowdown on Polly Jean Harvey's actual private life, a mystery as closely guarded as the whereabouts of Saddam Hussein and the formula for Coke--that's the secret of PJ Harvey's Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea, which even she allows is the happiest-sounding album she's ever made. What she daren't suggest is that it may also be the best.
The shift is first apparent in the music, which is, not to beat around the bush, fast. Way more easeful than the tightly wound, dynamically extreme bluesism of the career-launching Dry and Rid of Me, it's also way livelier than 1995's critical triumph To Bring You My Love, where Harvey's desperate carnality took a sharply metaphysical turn, and 1998's rhetorical question Is This Desire?, the answer to which was maybe. While her austere sonic signature remains, the vocals are discernibly more relaxed, the tunes welcoming and even expansive. Listen for shadings on the guitar attack, too--piano, organ, marimba, is that bandoneon? The album's an up from the first strums of "Big Exit," unquestionably the most rousing opener of her career.

Granted, maybe you'll smell shtick even so--our Polly, getting archetypal with the elementals again. After all, "Big Exit" does meditate painfully on human suffering. But the song's aesthetic thrust is all in the two lines of euphoria her ruminations try to rationalize away: "I'm immortal/When I'm with you." That's why it's so rousing. As she reports in the redolently titled "This Is Love": "I can't believe that the axis turns/On suffering when you taste so good." Long blessed with uncommon talent and success, Harvey can finally accept her "bad fortune slipping away."

Harvey has always been sex-obsessed. But there are better things to do with sex than obsess about it--enjoy it, for instance. And though the love affair the album describes or invents may end badly--e.g., the furious "Kamikaze," or the lovely "The Mess We're In," sung mostly by Radiohead's Thom Yorke--at least it sounds like a true affair, rather more full-bodied than "Robert DeNiro, sit on my face." Harvey and her beau ideal dance and get drunk, walk through Little Italy and sit looking at the skyline from a Brooklyn rooftop. Maybe they'll fulfill the dream of the finale: "But one day/We'll float/Take life as it comes." Or maybe she'll attain that state of grace with someone else. Whatever happens, this album will be there to remind her how happiness feels.

Rolling Stone, Nov. 9, 2000

Note: When printed, this was a four stars. As written it was 4.5 stars. In the Consumer Guide it is graded A+.

God he is DISGUSTING.

I have to work this evening, but I'll try to at least get the tracks run down started. 116 different songs were voted for. I'm going to do a top 60 countdown.

Before that, let's shed a tear for the three songs I voted for that didn't make the top 60:

haha he always got so creepy writing about her good lord. i know ppl here are already on record as finding it horrifyingly abysmal but i've always loved 'we float' as the closer, if you take it as straight forward hakuna matata (it means 'no worries') i can understand the horror but it's always played to me as this concluding statement, that on sftc you have this person who's been able to shrug off or revel in the agonies of life w/ intelligence or 'art' or sheer force of youth but those aren't enough for her (at least not today) and so either by meeting the right guy or just being in the right city she finds herself opening herself up to another person and relating to him as a person and not a construct and she's never known love like this before now she's lonely never more etc and maybe this is how you beat the demons but in a corner of her mind and on the occasional lyric something whispers 'maybe not' and so at the end she acknowledges this but hopes if not today maybe tomorrow. ten years later cut to some crone banging away on a piano about the war.

73. Happy and Bleeding - 64 points, 3 votes

Wow, I didn't know that many fans dislike Stories. I didn't vote but it's my favourite album of hers. (I only heard all of Dry very recently, though. It could give some competition.) I'm not a very lyrics-oriented listener. The tunes just feel more complete and satisfying to me.

There are some really intense moments on Rid of Me, and the sound is great, but the songwriting just seems incomplete to me, musically. The title track is classic though. My OPO is either that or "Sheela-na-Gig".

Also, wow, Christgau's an ass.

xposts

69. Teclo - 68 points, 3 votes

62. Ecstasy - 80 points, 4 votes

Teclo too loooooooow

69 & 62 were both cuts from my ballot.

I love "Kamikaze", voted for it, not big on the rest of that album but that song is great

if I'd have waited a day to vote I'd have voted for "Teclo", it got stuck in my head after I sent the ballot in

Teclo too slowwwwwww

Teclo was cut off mine at last minute too.

It was only a few places below my cutoff too

'teclo84' was one of my first AOL SNs

haha

Teclo too loooooooow

― the little prince of inane false binary hype (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, April 25, 2013 9:59 AM (1 hour ago)

holy shit, no kidding! my #5 and easily my favorite track off tbyml. kind of shocked, as i'd for some reason assumed it was one of her acknowledged classics.

gorgeous fucking song, nothing else she's ever done really sounds like it